From the Bookshelf of The Sword and Laser…

The Shining Girls

Lauren Beukes

Start date: January 1, 2024

Finish date: January 31, 2024

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The Shining Girls

TSG: Research Fails, or "It's the little things"
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last updated Mar 18, 2024 12:51PM

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last updated Jan 30, 2024 04:24AM

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What Members Thought

Dec 14, 2012 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read2013, netgalley, ebooks, sci-fi-fantasy

This is almost purely a horror, serial killer novel, except for the time travel element. The story is not told in linear time order, but in the order of events as the killer is experiencing them, as he goes to different time periods from a house that he believes is sending him. The killings are brutal, and he leaves clues that are so spread apart in time they are unlikely to be connected. Then he doesn't finish off one girl, Kirby, who settles into being one of the main, repeated characters in t ...more

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Oct 05, 2014 John Wiswell rated it it was amazing

An ideal October novel. Harper Curtis is a serial killer who’s stumbled onto a unique house, one whose doors let him walk through time. Police have found fingerprints and evidence at settings for over seventy years, and the best a reporter can come up with is that it’s a family of killers working on the same motif. But it’s just Harper, unstuck in time, tracking down the special girls who shine when he looks at them, leaving tokens with their younger selves until he finds the right year to take An ideal October novel. Harper Curtis is a serial killer who’s stumbled onto a unique house, one whose doors let him walk through time. Police have found fingerprints and evidence at settings for over seventy years, and the best a reporter can come up with is that it’s a family of killers working on the same motif. But it’s just Harper, unstuck in time, tracking down the special girls who shine when he looks at them, leaving tokens with their younger selves until he finds the right year to take them. But they’re smarter than he gives them credit, and they’re going to be the girls who bring him down.

Beukes reads like a fine inheritor of Stephen King, particularly because amid the perspectives of victims and their relations, we also see the world through Harper’s eyes. He’s confused, demented, sadistic without understanding himself, almost a victim of his own desires. You can sympathize with him, but even if you root against him like I did, seeing him not understand the house, or fail an attack on a shining girl, makes the peril for everyone else so much more palpable. You see that this man can be beaten, and you just hope they get it together before it’s too late. The big hook? A step through another door can mean it’s not too late for Harper. Suddenly he’ll be early, and another token will appear at another future crime scene.

Our biggest mouse in this cat-and-mouse game is Kirby Mazrachi, who once got a plastic pony from a strange man, a man who will one day try to cut her throat. She makes the first act of the novel pop because we race along her years, meeting her as a child just trying to rouse her mother out of depression, and then are suddenly with her as a sexually active teen. It feels wrong to imagine that kid necking for an hour, but that’s because she’s not the same little girl. Beukes’s novel is full of tantalizing jumps like that, taking us to different periods in relationships between its chapters that make your brain hiccup. I’ve never enjoyed the hiccups so much.

Those juxtapositions work because Beukes is a hell of a sentence-by-sentence writer. At their worst, her descriptions are smooth, but more often she turns phrases to create tone and personality, like, “It's that kind of day, crisp and clear, on the cusp of fall. The trees have mixed feelings about it; leaves showing green and yellow and brown all at the same time.”

It’s wonderful, even when it’s horrible. She’s as capable of writing the beauty of an Autumn day as she is the grizzliness of Harper finally catching one of these girls in front of us. And The Shining Girls is written in chapters that are just short enough to fly by, such that in three days I’ve decided to “just read one more” ten times. That brevity could be a shortcoming for some readers, as despite Harper skipping through decades, I seldom felt like I was rooted in a new time period. You are there to see a slice of someone’s life, and to see clues of what might put them into Harper or Kirby’s orbits, which often means the setting can’t get too deep. It’s the sort of thing a movie adaptation (and one has to happen eventually) will get away with easier, using thick set design and costuming.

I say that will be a flaw for some people because it wasn’t one for me. I’m not a Historical Fiction junkie. In the thrall of The Shining Girls, I was a character guy, with a hard love of Horror. It’s a splendid page-turner, and I’m so happy Beukes has written another book of this stripe. That might be the biggest flaw, as I try to support authors writing different things, but this is so fun that I wanted to pigeonhole her. I could happily read another of these every year in the weeks before Halloween. ...more

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Jul 05, 2013 Andrea rated it liked it

Shelves: time-travel, horror, thriller, spec-fic

Thrillers are not my usual fare, but I have a weakness for time travel. The Shining Girls has great characters, a rich setting, and a truly bad bad guy. I must have rushed to the end, because it felt like it was through in no time.

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Dec 27, 2013 Crowinator rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015-reads, genre-horror, adult, genre-mystery, assassins-and-serial-killers, time-travel, genre-thrillah, favorites-2015, genre-blend

Read Harder Challenge 2015: Author from Africa

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Jan 08, 2013 Jeff James rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ebooks, review-copies, netgalley

Lauren Beukes first came to my attention thanks to William Gibson or maybe Cory Doctorow. Some great author who recommended her on Twitter. I picked up her first two books, Moxyland and Zoo City, and read Moxyland a few years ago. I liked it, but it definitely felt like Gibson’s sensibility filtered through a South African setting. On the other hand, The Shining Girls, her third novel and first for Mulholland Books, reads like Beukes striking out on her own and making a name for herself. The res Lauren Beukes first came to my attention thanks to William Gibson or maybe Cory Doctorow. Some great author who recommended her on Twitter. I picked up her first two books, Moxyland and Zoo City, and read Moxyland a few years ago. I liked it, but it definitely felt like Gibson’s sensibility filtered through a South African setting. On the other hand, The Shining Girls, her third novel and first for Mulholland Books, reads like Beukes striking out on her own and making a name for herself. The result is stunning, harrowing and immensely readable.

The Shining Girls follows the interlocking lives of two characters: Curtis Harper, who discovers a mysterious house that lets him travel in time as long as he murders the “shining girls” mapped out on the bedroom wall, and Kirby Mazrachi, one of Harper’s attempted murder victims who manages to survive and devotes her life to tracking him down. We are also treated to heartbreaking vignettes of the women Harper kills throughout the 20th century; every woman he murders is full of endless potential that he snuffs out by torturing them to death and mutilating their bodies.

Although time travel is part of the narrative, The Shining Girls feels more like a crime thriller than a scifi story. It helps that the story all takes part in the past – Kirby’s “present day” is the early nineties. The speculative elements exist mostly as plot devices and a way to build tension, and Beukes doesn’t spend much time explaining how Harper is able to do what he does. Beukes has a background in journalism, and it’s clear that a lot of research went into this novel. The women we meet throughout the story span multiple social classes, decades and races, and each one is carefully drawn in the short moments before she dies terribly.

My only criticism of the novel is that it feels like Kirby discovers the truth very late in the story, and after that point everything kicks into high gear until the ending. I would have liked to see a bit more of Kirby exploring the strange world of the house and its dangerous inhabitant. If nothing else, Beukes left me wanting more at the end, which is definitely a positive thing. My hope is that The Shining Girls is just the first of Beukes’ forays into crime/thriller writing. It’s a genre that suits her well. ...more

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Apr 12, 2014 Serena rated it it was ok

Disappointed in a nutshell. The serial murders were a little too graphic (seemingly just for the sake of being so--and not in a fun trashy novel kind of way), the time travel a little too random and the house as a phenomenon never gets explored/explained in a satisfactory way.

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Dec 08, 2013 Maire rated it really liked it

This one was fun if only for me starting it on my return trip from Chicago. I had no idea that it was set there, and it was a nice surprise to be in a familiar setting, even if the subject matter is pretty creepy.

I'm not a big mystery/crime reader, but Harper was interesting enough to keep me enjoyed. ...more

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Jul 13, 2013 Elizabeth added it

The conceit of the house that exists outside of time and compels its own (grotesque) decoration/inhabitation is great. Was it great enough to warrant reading about the repeated ritual disemboweling of young girls? I don't know, I'm asking you. ...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Michael Underwood rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction, 2013-reads

An incredible work from the Arthur C. Clarke-award-winning author of ZOO CITY and MOXYLAND.

Absolutely beautiful language, gripping pacing, a tough but damaged protagonist and a gripping & creepy villain.

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